'When they
persecute you in one state, flee ye to another'Introduced and edited by Oliver
Marshall

2

The petition

Addressed to Pope Pius the Ninth, the petition reproduced
below was published in The Rev. G. Montgomery's Register
on 19 October 1867 (Vol. 1, No. 6).
[2] In his introduction,
Montgomery explained that only men whose 'upright and
unblemished character' he felt able to vouch for personally
and with confidence did he permit to sign the petition.
Clearly written by Montgomery, the priest claimed that he read
the entire text to all who were invited to sign the petition,
explaining the contents to every individual until he was
certain that it was fully understood (most of those committing
their names to the petition would have been illiterate). All
told, the ninety-six signatories - 'all heads of families' -
would have represented several hundred potential emigrants,
although it is unknown how many in fact proceeded to Brazil.

The petition vividly describes
the poverty, insecurity, religious and ethnic strife prevalent
in Wednesbury, conditions that offered a fertile recruitment
ground for agents seeking emigrants for distant parts of the
world that were invariably portrayed as a mirror image of the
place being left behind. Montgomery imagined that he would be
assisting tens of thousand of people to emigrate to Brazil
and, with the blessing of the Bishop of Birmingham, organised
the first party of 339 men, women and children who set off
from Wednesbury on 3 February 1868. Although most members of
the party arrived safely in Rio de Janeiro on 22 April 1868
and were soon transferred to agricultural colonies in the
south of the country (mainly Príncipe Dom Pedro in Santa
Catarina, but also to Cananéia in São Paulo), the scheme
rapidly collapsed, along with the health of Montgomery, who
died on 7 March 1871, unable to realise his own dream of travelling to Brazil (Marshall 2005: 63-87).

[2] The petition was first
reproduced as Appendix 1 in Oliver Marshall, English, Irish and Irish-American Pioneer
Settlers in Nineteenth-Century
Brazil
(Centre for Brazilian Studies, University of Oxford, 2005).

The
Humble Memorial & Petition of Certain Irish Catholics who
Sojourn in England, to Our Apostolic Lord, His Holiness Pope
Pius the Ninth.

We are fathers, heads of families, natives of Ireland; who,
pressed by poverty, have left the land of our birth, and
sojourn in England. We support ourselves by manual labour, for
most part of the rudest sort, and depend for employment
chiefly on the great manufacturing industry of this country.
When the trade of England languishes, there is little or no
need of our services, and we are frequently altogether
deprived of employment for many weeks together. In short, our
temporal condition is entirely at the disposal of persons who
have no relation to us but that of employers, who, so far as
we are concerned, using their money only to make more money,
hire us to work, or dismiss us to idleness, as their interests
require.

When we are dismissed or suspended from employment, we must
leave our families, and wander about “looking for work”; or
live in a half-naked, half-famished state, getting miserably
in debt; or, breaking up such homes as we have, we must seek
shelter in Poorhouses.

If we travel about looking for work, we are in danger of
departing far from our neighbourhood of priest and altar, and
thus of seeming, like Cain, “to go out from the face of the
Lord, and dwell as fugitives on the earth.” If we enter
the poor-houses , we go to imprisonment, to forceful
companionship with persons not Catholics, who may be hateful
to us; we must submit to the yoke of rules which are
oppressive, because they were not framed with our consent; and
too often are not administered with kindness, but are, in some
instances, repugnant to the laws of the Catholic Church; and
are, at best, but regulations for the orderly dispensing of
relief, grudgingly and of necessity given to the poor. How
dreadful the thought that we might die in these places, or
that our young children may be immured to them to grow up
listless, faithless parish paupers, having in after-life to
struggle for a place in the lowest grade of the social scale,
though we had hoped to rear our children to be in all respects
better off in this life than we ourselves have been!

We are told by some persons that we are improvident, and that
in prosperous seasons we might lay up something for the time
of distress. Some of us do indeed strive to provide for
periods of want, by reserving a portion of our earning as
contributions to a fund out of which we may receive some aid
when sickness or any bodily accident befalls us. But we cannot
do this and provide for the times when we are out of work; and
many of us have helpless children to support, and aged
parents, and other necessitous relatives, whom we must aid. It
is but seldom that we commit any wasteful excess; and if we
are not duly economical, perhaps it is because we have not had
the good fortune to be taught how to be so. Do our best, we
suffer that extreme and compulsory poverty against which we
are taught by the Holy Scriptures to pray.

To the evil of our extreme poverty there is added this other,
- that we are strangers in the land, disliked by the people
amongst whom we live, because of our nationality, because of
our religion, and because we are in competition with them for
employment. During the hours of our work, we have to associate
with persons who assail us with blasphemy against the most
sacred doctrines of the Catholic religion, with defamation of
the clergy and female religious persons, and with obscene
discourse. We know also that those around us attribute our
poverty, our faults, our follies, and our crimes to the
influence of the Catholic faith. This terrible storm of
persecution, of calumny, is sufficient to overwhelm persons
more steadfast than we are; and we tremble when we think of
the effect which it has on our children. At all times this
tempest is felt by the poor Irish in England, but just now -
excited by the fraud and malice of certain fanatics and
apostates - it rages with fury against us. So we, who are
sociably inclined, are forced to keep aloof as much as
possible from the people of the land, lest we be terrified or
seduced from our attachment to the faith.

We must complain, too, that the conditions under which we
live, as mere labourers in the places where we get employment,
and only as a minority of the general population, prevent us
from separating ourselves and our children from the
neighbourhood and companionship of certain Catholics - our
countrymen too - who openly and constantly violate divine and
human laws; persons who neglect all religious duties, and
abandon themselves to drunkenness, and the squalor and
shameful habits consequent upon irreligion and intemperance.
In the places where most of us reside, there are many such
Catholics; but there is not one Catholic employer, nor one who
occupies high social position, - not one to afford us
patronage.

Another evil in the natural order which afflicts us is, that
our children, who are born and grow up in England, must grow
up without patriotism; for we cannot teach them to love a
country which has departed from the Church and is hostile to
it, and which used its power for many ages to oppress our
native land, and to extinguish in it the light of faith. We
continually hear our fellow-Catholics - the English -
proclaiming their love of their country, and their great
loyalty to its Government, though that Government is alien to
the Church, and treats the Vicar of God with contempt; and
account it hard that we should be called on and expect to
think and speak like English Catholics. The mere fact that we
came to this country to labour for a living, and that poverty
compels us to remain in it, is not sufficient to make us love
it, nor cause us to teach our children to love it.

We do not complain that the cost to us of the
maintenance of our religion is, in proportion to our means,
very considerable; but we complain that, except in our
churches, - which we cannot frequent daily, - we scarcely see
or hear anything to remind us that that the Catholic religion
exists; and we complain that we, an illiterate people, have
not the moral and religious support which, in the conversation
and usages of every-day life, is afforded in other lands of
similar social conditions to our own. By continual
contradictions and blasphemies and ridicule directed against
Catholic doctrines and practices, we are indeed reminded of
the religion we profess. But if these things do not detach us,
natives of Ireland, from the Church, they tend not a little to
cause the crowning evil of our present state; that is, a too
well-grounded fear that our children, or our children’s
children, will apostatise. We have seen many children, born in
England of Irish-Catholic parents, make shipwreck of faith and
morality; and some of our clergy confidently assert that the
children of Irish in Great Britain who fall away from the
faith far exceed in number the natives of the land who are
converted to the Catholic Church.

We are painfully conscious of the evils which afflict us; we
groan and look up to God; we groan as a people persecuted, -
persecuted by the pressure of poverty, which has made us
exiles, which keeps us always strangers, and often wanderers,
in a land where we are degraded, insulted, calumniated,
importunately tempted to vice and heresy, plunged in
tribulation, “pressed out of measure above our strength, so
that we are weary even of life.”

What shall we do? Some of our friends tell us to be pious, to
be patient, and hope for better times in this land. But our
sense of the evils which encompass us is too keen to allow us
to be tranquil. Speaking with others similarly placed as
ourselves, we say, - doubtless the prelates and pastors and
missionary clergy of the Church in England do for us what they
can, labouring for us zealously, patiently, and with tender
compassion. But we cannot help hearing that these, our loved
an honoured friends, say, or hint, that we cannot remain in
the land, and refuse to become English; that we are a wayward
and troublesome people; that the number and greatness of our
necessities far exceed their means to relieve them adequately;
and that we seem to be a doomed race, that rapidly tends to
extinction. We cannot help hearing that these things are said
of us by our friends, and we hang our heads in shame and
sorrow; but we despair not. We refuse to be absorbed in the
English nation; we shrink from the prospect of the extinction
of our race; we shudder with horror at the idea of our
children becoming apostates, and deriding the faith and the
birth-place of their fathers; and we look with dread and
dismay upon the land in which an enormous proportion of our
people, old and young, are numbered as paupers and criminals.

We confess that all that has come upon us has happened by the
permission and the just judgement of God. We hear our divine
Saviour saying, “When they persecute you in one state, flee
ye to another,” and we look whither we may flee to obey
this precept, follow this counsel, or avail ourselves of this
permission - whichever it may be in our regard. To the United
States of America many of our kindred and friends have
recently gone, and there they are, in comparison with us, in
temporal prosperity, and religiously they are better
circumstanced than we are. We look wistfully after them. We
cannot follow them; we contemplate our misery sojourning here,
but we despair not of ourselves. We have cried to the divine
Jesus for mercy, to our Lady for help, to the Vicar of God for
his blessing; and the brightness of hope has illuminated our
path. Our hope is that we may be received into the empire of
Brazil, where such persons as we are, are wanted and would be
welcomed; there to find a home - a dwelling-place whence we
cannot be expelled at the mere will of others - and means to
be on our own lands constantly employed, and no longer the
sport of the fluctuations of trade; there to find a people the
vast majority of whom are Catholics - a sovereign who
recognises the divine Jesus in the Sacrament of the altar, and
who bows before mysteries which are here made the butt of the
unbelieving of scoff and ridicule; there to find a Government
Catholic by law.